Turkey

A Turkish journalist has been sentenced to 20 months in jail and stripped of legal rights over her children for breaching the confidentiality of a court case, her lawyer said on Wednesday, raising further concern about deteriorating press freedoms.

Arzu Yildiz was sued by the state after publishing footage in May 2015 from a court hearing at which four prosecutors were on trial for ordering a search of trucks belonging to Turkey's MIT intelligence agency as they traveled to Syria in 2014.

A series of violent attacks against women in Turkey has put the entire country on edge - with little hope for change. Could one woman's act of defiance begin to challenge an established culture of patriarchy?

For years it has been their ritual - women who lost children and husbands in 30 years of armed conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish state.I meet them in Diyarbakir - the final stop of our election trip across Turkey.Age and exhaustion are etched on their faces. One wears a necklace with a picture of her missing children. Another has a bracelet bearing the Kurdish flag."Turkey doesn't think we Kurds are humans", says Sakine Arat, 80, who lost four sons and one daughter in the fighting. "We've tried all the political parties but none sided with us. Now we've found one - the HDP - that treats us as equals. So we will vote for it."The People's Democratic Party (HDP) is the one to watch in Turkey's election on Sunday.Its roots and support base are Kurdish but it has broadened out, becoming a powerful voice of the Turkish left.

AMED – With a recent increase in threats against reporters for JINHA, Turkey and Kurdistan's only all-women and women-oriented news agency, JINHA reporters say those threatening them are doing so because they fear the threat that women-oriented reporting poses to male power.

A decision by Turkey's top court to allow citizens to be religiously married without a legally binding civil marriage has triggered uproar among the country's legal and human rights circles, who argue that the move would threaten the rights of women and children in the country.

‘Give women free guns!’ - It was one of those headlines that catches your eye, but not in a particularly good way. I read on with a feeling of unease I have learnt to associate with discussions of domestic violence in Turkey. The head of a women’s shelter, Şefkat-Der, it transpired – had suggested that women in fear of their lives be issued with licensed guns and receive state-funded shooting lessons as a last ditch effort to cut down on the murders of women.

We deplore the recent crackdown of the Turkish government on its own citizens, the clearly unjustified use of tear gas, acts of force, gas canisters and smoke bombs that have resulted in a vast number of injuries, imperiling the lives of those who seek to exercise their basic freedoms of assembly and protest.